Customer Reviews

The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up

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This collection of short stories is easy to read and never boring. It gives the reader a picture of life in China that is very different from the propaganda we get from the governments in China and in the United States. If anyone wants to know about a culture or a country, observing the bottom of society is much more enlightening and accurate than looking at the society from the top. I suspect that most of us, in China and the rest of the world, are much closer to the bottom of our societies than we are to the leaders of those societies. I thank the author for braving the wrath of his government to show us a glimpse of real life in the real China. It makes me think that the more different we appear to be, the more we are all the same.

I picked up this book after reading a review in the Financial Times. And I couldn't put it down. There is so much being written about China but nothing out there presents such a fascinating glimpse into the lives of ordinary people who are out of view in all the talk about the economic power.

As Studs Terkel did for American workers in "Working" and other books of oral history, so Liao does for the Chinese in this wide-ranging collection of interviews. From landowners to restroom attendants, from former Red Guards to Tiananmen parents, from professional mourners, feng shui practitioners, and fortune tellers to safecrackers and human traffickers, Liao encourages the ordinary people of China to tell their extraordinary stories.

A dissident poet and journalist who has himself been imprisoned, Liao has talked to everyone. Twin themes of incredible cruelty and quiet endurance run through the interviews. Some of the exchanges are hilarious, many of the accounts are deeply disturbing and tragic, and all of them portray the rapid changes China has undergone since the 1949 communist victory.

A Red Guard tells of torturing a school principal who had dedicated his life to the revolutionary cause, only to be accused at the start of the Cultural Revolution of forcing Western science on his students. The principal committed suicide. When asked if he ever felt he had gone too far the former Guard says:

"I was born into a family of blue-collar workers. The Cultural Revolution offered me the opportunity to finally trample on these elite. It was glorious. I couldn't get enough of it."

The human trafficker, Qian, interviewed in prison, describes how China's shortage of girls led to his success in the kidnapping and forced marriage business. He discovered the money to be made by selling his own daughters. "What do they know about happiness?" Qian responds when Liao expresses distaste. "My daughters are the children of a poor peasant."

Liao does not bother with Western journalism's objectivity. After Qian brags about his lying skills, Liao concludes the interview: "If I were the judge, I would first cut off your tongue as punishment. It deserves to be cut off."

No one has escaped China's political upheaval. The title interview, "The Corpse Walker," describes an old custom in which, back in unpaved China, people who died far from home would be taken on foot back to their families. But what starts out as a rather colorful, curious tale of an outmoded profession turns tragic as mob bloodlust and class hatred intervene.

The Cultural Revolution transformed a generation. Education was devalued, lives were blighted, torture and execution were common. The stories are heart-rending, but most of the tellers are more philosophical and fatalistic than bitter.

There is overall agreement that life in China is better these days, though many find the preoccupation with money ironic and a few lament the passing of their professions. The professional mourner describes how funeral rituals have changed, incorporating pop songs and limos. "People are not what they used to be. They don't even pretend to be sorrowful."

These very particular, individual stories breathe life into swathes of history. A Buddhist abbot describes an old woman's generosity during the widespread starvation of the 1960-61 famine, an old man tells of forsaking his bright revolutionary future for the love of a politically incompatible woman during the Cultural Revolution, a peasant matter-of-factly demonstrates the still destructive power of superstition (and the gulf between city and country) in "The Leper."

Liao's sympathetic and insightful interviews paint a complex, often breathtaking portrait of a convulsive period in a vast land.

I read this book after seeing a positive review in the Chicago Tribune and it did not disappoint. Each story of everyday Chinese citizens and their struggles was very memorable, touching and thought-provoking. As an American, I also found it very enlightening, and thought the stories were so important that I recommended the book to family and friends.

The Corpse Walker is the kind of book you will think about long after you've finished reading it!

This is a fascinating and engrossing book that provides 27 glimpses into lives that have not faired so well in China. The author, Liao Yiwu, is a poet who has drawn upon his own life to conduct interviews with people from the bottom of society. This extremely well-done English translation draws upon 27 interviews from the 60 in the original Chinese book. The people range from the occupation from which the book draws the title - an ancient method of transporting dead bodies for burial - to a 103 year-old Buddhist abbot to a rest room manager to a blind street erhu player. Liao is by no means an objective interviewer; he does not let the Human Trafficker (already in jail) of easily. Each chapter is titled by the role or occupation of the interviewee. These are people who have suffered under the various deprivations of revolutionary communism, the cultural revolution, or the newest era of capitalist communism. Liao brings a harsh light to many of the sufferings of the past. However, despite the accumulated human misery, this is not a depressing book. Many of the people interviewed, as the original Chinese title describes "Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society", are not the wildly successful, they often have come to accept their lot in life, and they have a quiet dignity the perfuses their words. I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants to see a very different view of life in China.

The simplest way to describe Liao Yiwu's book is as a Chinese version of a Studs Terkel oral history. The subtitle "Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up" might mislead a potential reader to expect personal stories of life in contemporary China. Instead, Liao's subjects primarily focus on their lives during the turbulent years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution with little being said about today's China. Notable exceptions, however, include chapters titled The Tiananmen Father, The Falun Gong Practitioner, and The Migrant Worker.

The stories are quite interesting and often heart-breaking. For anyone unfamiliar with Maoist Chinese political reeducation practices, Liao's work will provide eye-opening testaments. Night after night, the "capitalist roader", the former big landowner, or some other "enemy of the people" are subjected to intensely personal criticism by their neighbors. The subjects are expected to engage in scorching self-criticism as well.

Liao does not provide much context of what China was like before the Revolution, the immense task the Maoists faced in wrenching China onto a new course, and how the material lives of ordinary people benefited (the catastrophically disastrous Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution being significant exceptions even on that score). Anyway, Liao's purpose is not balance, but to let his subjects tell their stories and in that he succeeds. Look eleswhere for a fuller picture.

Liao's work does not rise to the level of Terkel's best (e.g. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do or Division Street: America), but is well worth a read for anyone with an interest in China during the Maoist years and beyond. Recommended.

Here we learn how Mao's Cultural Revolution relentlessly destroyed China's civil life and its entire working infrastructure, millions of decent, innocent citizens.

There is so much suffering in these documents of survival on the streets, back alleys and in the desperate countryside that I put the book down many times only to pick it up again the way a tongue seeks the sore tooth. Do not look for a happy ending.

What remains of this debacle is the deep humanity of the Chinese people. Corpse Walker is excellent background for the novels of current Chinese writers such as Ha Jin.

The collection of stories in The Corpse Walker is comparable to the most fantastic of Jorge Luis Borges' fiction, except they are real. I always thought that China, as big as it is, must be home to some of the weirdest human stories in the planet. Add some fifty years of communist dictatorship to the mix and it is impossible that it wouldn't be. Now Liao Yiwu, the only Chinese among the 1.5 billion that I can truly say I would dig a whole all the way to China in order to meet, gives to the world a glimpse of what some of those stories are. Where else would corpse walking exist as a profession? Where else would they select choice human excrement for delivery to a commune, once visited by Chairman Mao, where it was used as fertilizer?

Throughout, you get a hint that Liao Yiwu did not stumble into the stories by accident. His wit and genius comes through loud and clear.

My only complaint is why only one volume? Why did Pantheon Books not publish the three volumes that are mentioned in the introduction?

On the strength of this book, I think Liao Yiwu deserves the Nobel Prize. Since there isn't one for muckraking, he should be given one for Medicine on the grounds that he helps keep the world sane.

Each ten to fifteen page chapter tells a vignette or a story from one person on the lower rung of society in China. There are twenty some chapters written in interview format (the author wrote each interview based on conversations during which he took notes). The people interviewed include criminals, beggars, and many people put out by the government. The author does not give much historical context, which is not necessarily needed because historic events (famine, political upheavals, etc) are explained through the interviews.

"The Corpse Walker" is very easy to read, even with the heart-wrenching stories. It goes quickly. I would love to read the other interviews that are available in the Chinese version.

I first came across some of these interviews in various issues of The Paris Review and I was fascinated by them. When this book came out, I couldn't resist it. The Corpse Walker is a collection of interviews between Liao Yiwu and various Chinese people who are mainly understood by their position: public restroom manager, feng shui master, retired official, composer, abbot, mortician, safecracker, and so on. From these interviews, we get real insight into what life was like for an average person in China from the time of the last days of the Nationalist government through today. As such, it is an invaluable document.

For an American like myself, there is so much here that is eye-opening. There are various differences in customs, both amazing and horrifying. The corpse walking of the title is interesting. The leper who accepted with equanimity the fact that his wife was burned alive by her village disgusts. The blind erhu player who survives playing his music around town through the auspices of a blind musicians' guild is wonderful.

Then there are the many stories of people who have suffered under the communist regime in various ways: the former landowner stripped of everything when the Nationalist government fell, the village teacher who flowed with the ups and downs of the communists, the Tiananmen father who struggles to get the word out about the death of his son during the student uprisings in the face of pressure to keep silent. So many of these stories have aspects reflective of twentieth century China--reactions to the Communist takeover, the Great Leap Forward, the famine years, the Cultural Revolution, the opening to the West. These words, which are no more than concepts to us in America, directly impacted the lives of everyone in this book and it is astounding to hear how people coped.

If there is a weakness in this book, it is that Liao Yiwu is by no means a dispassionate observer of his subjects. He occasionally ridicules them and is dismissive of them. This is rather jarring for a reader who often feels compassion for people who have suffered in many ways. Still, these rare lapses are no reason to skip this book. Every single interview in the book is worthwhile. It offers a look at China unlike any other I have yet encountered.